


Taken

by rainer76



Category: Fringe
Genre: Dark, Extreme AU, F/M, Post 4:15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-12
Updated: 2012-04-12
Packaged: 2017-11-03 12:25:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter's questionable influence - the way things have stayed exactly the same - and the little manner of differences.  Not necessarily a happy story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taken

Olivia spends the first day of her enforced vacation reading case-files, the jobs she’s performed as part of Fringe division, take two. Peter doesn’t disturb her. Eidetic memory doesn’t translate to speed-reading and Olivia takes her time, committing the facts, the sequence of events, looking between the handwriting for the nuances that pepper an official report.

Looking for the personal.

She starts at the kitchen table with an orange juice beside her, dry cereal poured into a coffee mug that she picks at randomly. She ends the day sprawled on the bed, a tumbler in reach and with Peter’s hand centred on her spine. He lies beside her, one leg tossed artlessly between Olivia’s thighs, his body curled close. His lashes are dark on his cheekbones. He smells like sleep and male, like sex, bed-sheets and Olivia both. She can feel each exhalation against her forearm, his breath reassuringly steady. Olivia trails one hand across his cheek until her fingertips rest against his lips. She doesn’t regret it. She remembers the carousel blur of sick terror as her world reformed; the clutch of _holdholdhold_ that dissipated. The birth of weary suspicion, and the drive to keep the Walter’s from tearing each other apart over the newly formed bridge.

Forty per cent of her memory is missing.

There’s a black hole sun – not memory but sensation, of emotions pressured down, compacted and squeezed into nothingness - one stitch in time where her whole world narrowed until Olivia couldn’t remember what she was grasping for. He breathes beside her, thigh between her legs, arm heavy across her spine.

Olivia runs her finger from his bottom lip to the point of his chin. The moment of unleashed power, raw with terror - a half second of consciousness when she _knew_ reality was changing - is not a moment she wants to recall with certainty. It’s filled with dread, of something stirring, rolling in her blood, carried in her bloodstream with all the dead infections of youth. Ella and her fear of injections. Rachel’s married. Olivia has a nephew she’s never met. Greg’s her brother in law…still. Nina raised them from childhood.

_Eddie._

Sixty per cent of her memories are intact but not that.

 

***

They were closer in the original timeline. They made a conscientious effort to hook up, weekly phone-calls, visits. Ella staying over for birthday parties, trips to the zoo, Science Works. Olivia has clear memories of all of these events. She flies out to Chicago the day after the porcupine case because she has a nephew she’s never met. Because she told an FBI shrink her and Rachel were close and saw the question mark in one daintily raised eyebrow. Olivia remembers her…and remembers her, too...she might have requested another shrink except for the red flags it would have raised.

Olivia takes her childhood journal for the flight, the first present Nina Sharp gave her, Italian leather, the pages yellowed and textured rough. The first entry is a drawing, sans words, an alarmed looking question mark half doubled over and puking its guts out. She drew it when she was twelve, on her first night in the mansion, almost tore it from the bindings when she was sixteen. Now, Olivia thinks, it’s weirdly prophetic. Puking her guts out while questioning everything - while everyone questions _her_ \- seems appropriate.

Sorting through the pages is like reading AltLiv’s journal - where the words flow with the inner rhythm of Olivia’s monologue - but none of the events match up. Rachel followed her to Northwestern instead of opting for community college. Olivia blinks at the new information furiously until she can vaguely recall Rachel’s graduation. The differences between one timeline and another are the hallmarks, one of the advantages, of Nina’s money.

Greg: Olivia can’t imagine a world where she would like the douche bag, finds it hard to fathom how they could still be together, wonders exactly how Peter’s presence, or lack thereof, might have influenced the marital status of her sister. Nina’s money and Northwestern University - versus community college and no money at all.

Olivia feels her stomach drop with the airplanes turbulence and pulls out her mobile phone.

She already knows there won’t be any photos on it, she wouldn’t risk accidently losing it, or have one of the unsavoury elements of her job (the type of criminals she hunts), find it and identify her remaining family. Rachel’s number is listed but Greg’s isn’t. There are three or four names on speed-dial Olivia doesn’t recognise and she thinks, a little sickly, she should have forgone the case-files and committed as much of her ‘personal’ history to her eidetic memory as possible. Hunted down every journal, found every photo album.

Rachel met Greg at community college. Something coils tight around the base of Olivia’s spine, spirals upward to her windpipe and _squeezes._

Ella was small for an eight year old, her bones hollow tipped, her hair dirty blonde. She was born four weeks prematurely. Ella would giggle and squeal if a finger so much as pointed toward her ribcage. She was fearless, inquisitive, had nightmares about needles and dead things entering her blood. She would sing karaoke to Beyonce’s greatest hits, and sit breathless for any story Olivia cared to tell. She would sleep with her hands fisted close to her chin, body curled tight as an armadillo, protecting her belly.

When Olivia meets Rachel, her nephew Eddie, it takes everything in her self-control not to turn the corner and throw up. Ella is tall for an eight year old. She has the same stature Olivia had at the same age. She has Rachel’s nose, a gentle ski-slope, but her hair is ebony black, her chin square. She doesn’t throw herself forward into Olivia’s arms but hangs back warily, and the only thing she shares in common with a girl who no longer exists is the namesake that binds them. _Tony_ has been happily married to Olivia’s sister for eleven years, they met at Northwestern, loves her deeply. Olivia can’t remember him, the same as she can’t remember his son, or the girl who wears his face, blurred with femininity and a pre-adolescent body. Ella excuses herself at the earliest opportunity. She plonks down in front of the TV with the PS3, a remote in hand, and tells Aunt Olivia loftily: _Please, Operation is a game for dumb **kids**_.

Olivia flies back, eyes shut against the bright sun streaming through the windows, and thinks hollowly _This isn’t my world_.

Until she remembers that it _is_.

She leaves fingermarks down Peter’s spine, wanting to hurt without comprehending why. She kisses him; hand curled loosely around his throat, sucks the oxygen from his lungs and breathes it back down. Feeding him air that’s used and recycled. She straddles his lower body with her knees caging his ribs, hips rolling forward, overwhelming his borders like a magnetic tide. Olivia can feel the way he swallows convulsively - the bob of his Adam’s apple against her palm - the rough grain against her fingertip. His hand settles on her leg, creeps into the melting shadows where her hip slopes into her inner thigh, centimetres from where their bodies meet. He strokes her without delving further, patient in the face of her anger. _Knowing._ Even when Olivia has no direction for the lash of horror-rage that urges her to act. He stays pinned until her anger leaches away. Peter bares his throat, rubs his forefinger against the slickness of her clit. His knees creep upward until his feet are flat against the mattress, her lower back supported by his thighs.

Olivia turns the corner of her palimpsest page until she realises it isn’t sex or rage or mourning but a combination of the three. Olivia’s chosen to remember what she lost, and now she’s paid the price in full. Their bedroom is the one place she can’t afford to bring her tally of costs.

She gentles. All of the arguments had been for what she was losing in _this_ world – without a thought spared for what she had lost in the other. Olivia folds forward, breasts pressed against his torso, head tucked under his chin. It changes the angle of penetration, stretches her inner walls, makes each thrust shallow, pointed. Her pelvic floor clenches, Peter shudders against her. Olivia’s fingers slip from his throat and curl into the dent of his collarbones. “Sorry.”

How do you do this? She doesn’t think she uttered the words aloud. They’re mouthed against salty skin. A nomad, she’d once called Peter Bishop. There’s bliss in the blindness Olivia once held, in the _not_ knowing, in the ignorance of an alternate life. She thinks, harshly, there’s strength to Peter she never once entertained, or understood, although unlike Olivia, Peter was never given the option in the burden. Ella, she writes, into his collarbone, his flesh. _Walter_. These things were hers once upon a time, intricate relationships that were stamped upon her mind, family, sister, niece, father, they were Peter’s too, and now both have changed drastically. How do you start over? Knowing everything you’ve lost? Ironically, how do you let yourself _forget?_

“Taken,” she says aloud, echoing what she told Markham, who hadn’t recognised either one of them. The word sounds ominous, rolling between the heavy silence of their bedroom, part promise, part threat, paid for in memory. “You’re taken too.”

He levers upward, stomach muscles braced and one arm working to bear their weight. It puts Olivia above him, hands tightening on his shoulders. “Very much so,” he agrees, and then quietly, hesitantly. “You’ll tell me what happened in Chicago?”

“No. “ She doesn’t have the words for the grief, the knowing of what’s changed, how it’s changed. “Not for now.” Peter looks at her sharply, and in the shadows of her room, Olivia can’t read his expression at all. 


End file.
